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• Is C and Python enough?

  - by gruszczy

  I am very proficient in Python (including Django), which I use for most tasks. I am also quite confident with C; I am maintaining small file system in userspace written in C. Yet when I am browsing job offers I see everywhere Java/C# and sometimes C++. I have coded profesionally in C++ for half a year in a gaming company, but I don't consider myself a pro. Also I simply despise Java and C#, which I would prefer not to touch ever. But it seems to me, that I am at very unfavorable position, when it comes to career. I am browsing careers.stackoverflow.com and I don't see and pure python or C offers. I would like to find a new job abroad in about 6 months. If I find some python offer, it means doing web development (not my favorite job). Does it mean, that I have to quickly start improving my C++ skills, if I wish to find a satisfying job? What would you suggest me? EDIT Learning new technologies is not an issue. Company I am working in is an integrator. Basically every new project requires learning new technologies, sometimes custom made. During last two years I was writing SQLs by hand, using LDAP, writing GUI in Qt, working on large scale DBMS prototype, making our internal help desk system use gsm modem or writing own report system. In previous job I had to learn from basics everything what I could about games development, because I knew nothing and chose this job only because of the challene it posed. I am all about embracing new technologies. I have used Java in the past and simply didn't like it. It's dull and boring. Doesn't let me do anything cool. I have recently seen some C# in action and seems similar. I don't like it. It's like German. I don't like speaking German.

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• Great Blog Comments

  - by Paul Sorensen

  Just a quick note to let you know that in the interest of keeping the most useful content available here on the Oracle Certification Blog, we do moderate the comments. We welcome (and encourage dialog, questions, comments, etc) here on the topics at hand. We'll never 'censor' out a comment just because we don't like it - in fact, this is how we often learn ways in which we can do better. But of course we will filter out the typical list like anyone else: crude/offensive remarks, foul language, reference to illegal activity, etc. We will also often redirect any customer-service type inquiries to [email protected] where they can best be handled.Also, if you have a question of a general nature, please research it on the Oracle Certification website first. We often won't respond to questions asking such as "tell me how to get 11g ocp", as we've already made sure that you have that kind of information available. Now if we've inadvertently 'hidden' something on our site (gulp), then fair enough - please let us know that you're having a hard time finding it and we'll be sure to try and "unbury it" ;-)Additionally, you may have more of an 'opinion' type question, such as "should I do 'x' certification or 'y' certification." For these, we highly recommend checking on the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) Certification Forum, where you can engage in peer-to-peer discussions, share techniques, advice and best practices with others in the field.In the meantime, please continue to share your thoughts, ideas, opinions, tech tips etc - we look forward to seeing them and passing them wherever we can!QUICK LINKS:Oracle Certification WebsiteEmail - Customer ServiceOracle Technology Network (OTN) Certification Forum

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• What is a good basic/flexible cms for a small website? [closed]

  - by Samuel

  Possible Duplicate: Which Content Management System (CMS) should I use? I'm designing a very basic portfolio website for an artist. It features a blog, portfolio, cv and contact page. I've handcoded the basics of this site in php/java, as it is a very small website (and I like coding by hand). But I need a simple cms backend for the dynamic parts of the website (the blog/portfolio). The big systems (ruby, joomla, wordpress) are far too invasive for my liking (and frankly a bit beyond my capabilities). Wordpress for example, requires too much adaptation of the design to the wordpress structure, and ruby is far too extensive for a simple site like this (in my opinion). So what I'm looking for is a (preferably open source) cms that has a simple backend for the artist to use as a blogger, with a mysql database for the content, that will allow me to insert content with simple tags (using smarty tags for example), but is otherwise not too invasive or demanding in terms of the required page structure. Does anyone know of a good cms that fits this description? p.s.: I have tried phpnews and cmsmadesimple, but phpnews was a litte too basic (but very close too what I'm looking for) and cmsmadesimple was way too slow (but otherwise also pretty close too what I wanted, though a bit too extensive).

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• How do I create a 2.5d parallax effect?

  - by Nikolay Dyankov

  I have a decent background in 3D graphics and programming, but I'm new to game development. I'm currently exploring different possibilities and I really want to make an RPG game. I was thinking about classic 2D isometric view, but I really love how Diablo 2 looks and feels to play. My question is - how can I achieve Diablo 2's parallax effect? Everything looks hand drawn with baked lights and shadows and looks awesome, but when you move around you notice some perspective. For example, let's say that I drew a big hall with columns in Photoshop with an orthographic perspective (classic pixel art style, just parallel lines). How would I give parallax effect to this scene when the character moves around? If I use camera-facing sprites for everything it would probably look OK in the distance, but it would be really fake when a character comes close to a column (cylinder) for example. Any suggestions? How did Blizzard make the parallax effect in Diablo 2? See this screenshot: http://guidesmedia.ign.com/guides/10629/images/act2tombs.jpg

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• Versioning millions of files with distributed SCM

  - by C. Lawrence Wenham

  I'm looking into the feasibility of using off-the-shelf distributed SCMs such as Git or Mercurial to manage millions of XML files. Each file would be a commercial transaction, such as a purchase order, that would be updated perhaps 10 times during the lifecycle of the transaction until it is "done" and changes no more. And by "manage", I mean that the SCM would be used to not just version the files, but also to replicate them to other machines for redundancy and transfer of IP. Lets suppose, for the sake of example, that a goal is to provide good performance if it was handling the volume of orders that Amazon.com claimed to have at its peak in December 2010: about 150,000 orders per minute. We're expecting the system to be distributed over many servers in order to get reasonable performance. We're also planning to use solid-state drives exclusively. There is a reason why we don't want to use an RDBMS for primary storage, but it's a bit beyond the scope of this question. Does anyone have first-hand experience with the performance of distributed SCMs under such a load, and what strategies were used? Open-source preferred, since the final product is to be FOSS, too.

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• Elementary OS boots to a terminal (other OS) [on hold]

  - by Benjamin Watson

  Im new to this site, please forgive me if I missed some posting protocol of some sort. I am attempting to install Luna on my samsung s2 laptop (a8 amd radeon 7640g) and when I click on try luna, it just pulls up a terminal after the insignia (curvy E). When I install it, same issue. CTRL-ALT-f7 reveals this (hand typed, sorry if there's typos) Starting preload: *starting CUPS printing spooler/server *stopping save kernel messages preload. fsck from util-linux 2.20.1 fsck from util-linux 2.20.1 dosfsck 3.0.12, 29 oct 2011 FAT32, LFN /dev/sda1: 3 files, 245/189518 clusters /dev/sda2: clean, 133841/30294016 files, 2529529/121164544 blocks Skipping profile in /etc/apparmor.d/disable: usr.sbin.rsyslogd *starting AppArmor profiles speech-dispacher disabled; edit /etc/default/speech-dispenser *stopping system V initialisation compatibility *starting system V runlevel compatability *starting apci daemon *starting anac(h)ronistic cron *starting save kernal messages *starting ntp server ntpd *starting regular background program processing damon *starting deferred execution scheduler *stopping anac(h)ronistic cron *starting LightDM Display Manager *starting bluetooth daemon *starting mDNS/DNS-SD daemon *starting CPU interrupts balancing daemon *stopping Send an event to indicate plymouth is up saned disabled ; edit /etc/default/saned *starting network connection manager *starting crash report submission daemon *checking battery state... That's it. I can't make heads or tails of it. Please note that while I've been running linux for about a year, I'm still fairly new to all of this, so try to be detailed in your explanations and/or descriptions of what I need to do. Any/all help would be appreciated. Thank you for your time.

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• Should we write detailed architecture design or just an outline when designing a program?

  - by EpsilonVector

  When I'm doing design for a task, I keep fighting this nagging feeling that aside from being a general outline it's going to be more or less ignored in the end. I'll give you an example: I was writing a frontend for a device that has read/write operations. It made perfect sense in the class diagram to give it a read and a write function. Yet when it came down to actually writing them I realized they were literally the same function with just one line of code changed (read vs write function call), so to avoid code duplication I ended up implementing a do_io function with a parameter that distinguishes between operations. Goodbye original design. This is not a terribly disruptive change, but it happens often and can happen in more critical parts of the program as well, so I can't help but wondering if there's a point to design more detail than a general outline, at least when it comes to the program's architecture (obviously when you are specifying an API you have to spell everything out). This might be just the result of my inexperience in doing design, but on the other hand we have agile methodologies which sort of say "we give up on planning far ahead, everything is going to change in a few days anyway", which is often how I feel. So, how exactly should I "use" design?

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• How can a non-technical person can learn to write a spec for small projects?

  - by Joseph Turian

  How can a non-technical person learn to write specs for small projects? A friend of mine is trying to outsource some development on a statistics project. In particular, he does a lot of work in excel, and wants to outsource the creation of scripts to do what he now does by hand. However, my friend is extremely non-technical. He is poor at writing technical specs. When he does write a spec, it is written the way you would describe doing something in excel (go to this cell and then copy the value to that cell). It is also overly verbose, and does examples several times. I'm not sure if he properly describes corner cases. The first project he outsourced was a failure. I think he overdescribed some details, but underdescribed corner cases. That and/or the coder he hired didn't think through the corner cases and ask appropriate questions. I'm not sure. I got on IM with him and it took me half an hour to dig out a description that should have taken five minutes or less to describe. I wrote the scripts for him at the end, but didn't examine why his process with the coder failed. He has asked me for help. However, I refuse to get involved, because taking his spec and translating it into clear requirements is 10x more work than executing on a clearly written spec. What is the right way for him to learn? Are there resources he could use? Are there ways he can learn from small, low-pressure practice projects with coders? [edit: Most of his scripts are statistical and data processing oriented. e.g. take this column and run an average over it. Remove these rows under these conditions. So the challenge is different than spec'ing a web app.]

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• Facebook Stories for Retailers

  - by David Dorf

  Getting people to "like" a brand is important because it opens the door to a possible B2C relationship. Once a person likes that brand, the brand can post to their newsfeed with promotions, announcements, and surveys. At least for me, I "hide" the noisy brands and just monitor the ones that keep posts under 4 times a week. I see lots of people, especially with fashion brands, comment on postings at which point the posting is seen by their network. A metric I've heard (but not verified) is that for every person that comments, ten of their friends see the original posting. That's a pretty cheap way to communicate to potential customers in a viral way. Over at mainstreet.com they compiled the a list of the top liked retailers on Facebook as of Feb 1, 2011. They are listed below: 19,414,892 Starbucks 11,302,939 Victoria's Secret 7,925,184 Zara 7,032,398 McDonald's 6,117,222 H&M 5,400,586 Taco Bell 4,665,760 Subway 4,494,849 Lacoste 4,185,570 Hollister 3,973,181 Forever 21 So I guess the public likes their fast-food and fashion. To take this to the next level, Facebook is now displaying Sponsored Stories, which I saw for the first time on my page this weekend. I found this picture at the Wall Blog that depicits Sponsored Stories very well. Over on the right-hand column of a person's page, where they see advertisements and such, Facebook will post stories involving their network of friends and their interaction with sponsored brands. Now their "likes" can suddenly become your ads. "Jessica and Philip like Starbucks. What are you waiting for?" This is another great way to take messages viral by accessing social graphs. As usual there will be a certain level of outcry from privacy advocates, but given the other more iniquitous issues, I believe this will fall by the wayside. Retailers should consider using Sponsored Stories to increase their Likes, and thus increase their voice in the social world.

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• How to handle growing QA reporting requirements?

  - by Phillip Jackson

  Some Background: Our company is growing very quickly - in 3 years we've tripled in size and there are no signs of stopping any time soon. Our marketing department has expanded and our IT requirements have as well. When I first arrived everything was managed in Dreamweaver and Excel spreadsheets and we've worked hard to implement bug tracking, version control, continuous integration, and multi-stage deployment. It's been a long hard road, and now we need to get more organized. The Problem at Hand: Management would like to track, per-developer, who is generating the most issues at the QA stage (post unit testing, regression, and post-production issues specifically). This becomes a fine balance because many issues can't be reported granularly (e.g. per-url or per-"page") but yet that's how Management would like reporting to be broken down. Further, severity has to be taken into account. We have drafted standards for each of these areas specific to our environment. Developers don't want to be nicked for 100+ instances of an issue if it was a problem with an include or inheritance... I had a suggestion to "score" bugs based on severity... but nobody likes that. We can't enter issues for every individual module affected by a global issue. [UPDATED] The Actual Questions: How do medium sized businesses and code shops handle bug tracking, reporting, and providing useful metrics to management? What kinds of KPIs are better metrics for employee performance? What is the most common way to provide per-developer reporting as far as time-to-close, reopens, etc.? Do large enterprises ignore the efforts of the individuals and rather focus on the team? Some other questions: Is this too granular of reporting? Is this considered 'blame culture'? If you were the developer working in this environment, what would you define as a measureable goal for this year to track your progress, with the reward of achieving the goal a bonus?

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• C#.NET (AForge) against Java (JavaCV, JMF) for video processing

  - by Leron

  I'm starting to get really confused looking deeper and deeper at video processing world and searching for optimal choices. This is the reason to post this and some other questions to try and navigate myself in the best possible way. I really like Java, working with Java, coding with Java, at the same time C# is not that different from Java and Visual Studio is maybe the best IDE I've been working with. So even though I really want to do my projects in Java so I can get better and better Java programmer at the same time I'm really attract to video processing and even though I'm still at the beginning of this journey I want to take the right path. So I'm really in doubt could Java be used in a production environment for serious video processing software. As the title says I already have been looking at maybe the two most used technologies for video processing in Java - JMF and JavaCV and I'm starting to think that even they are used and they provide some functionality, when it comes to real work and real project that's not the first thing that comes to once mind, I mean to someone that have a professional opinion about this. On the other hand I haven't got the time to investigate .NET (c# specificly) options but even AForge looks a lot more serious library then those provided for Java. So in general -either ways I'm gonna spend a lot of time learning some technology and trying to do something that make sense with it, but my plan is at the end the thing that I'll eventually come up to be my headline project. To represent my skills and eventually help me find a job in the field. So I really don't want to spend time learning something that will give me the programming result I want but at the same time is not something that is needed in the real world development. So what is your opinion, which language, technology is better for this specific issue. Which one worths more in terms that I specified above?

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• When are Getters and Setters Justified

  - by Winston Ewert

  Getters and setters are often criticized as being not proper OO. On the other hand most OO code I've seen has extensive getters and setters. When are getters and setters justified? Do you try to avoid using them? Are they overused in general? If your favorite language has properties (mine does) then such things are also considered getters and setters for this question. They are same thing from an OO methodology perspective. They just have nicer syntax. Sources for Getter/Setter Criticism (some taken from comments to give them better visibility): http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-09-2003/jw-0905-toolbox.html http://typicalprogrammer.com/?p=23 http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AccessorsAreEvil http://www.darronschall.com/weblog/2005/03/no-brain-getter-and-setters.cfm http://www.adam-bien.com/roller/abien/entry/encapsulation_violation_with_getters_and To state the criticism simply: Getters and Setters allow you to manipulate the internal state of objects from outside of the object. This violates encapsulation. Only the object itself should care about its internal state. And an example Procedural version of code. struct Fridge { int cheese; } void go_shopping(Fridge fridge) { fridge.cheese += 5; } Mutator version of code: class Fridge { int cheese; void set_cheese(int _cheese) { cheese = _cheese; } int get_cheese() { return cheese; } } void go_shopping(Fridge fridge) { fridge.set_cheese(fridge.get_cheese() + 5); } The getters and setters made the code much more complicated without affording proper encapsulation. Because the internal state is accessible to other objects we don't gain a whole lot by adding these getters and setters. The question has been previously discussed on Stack Overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/565095/java-are-getters-and-setters-evil http://stackoverflow.com/questions/996179

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• Alternative to Game State System?

  - by Ricket

  As far as I can tell, most games have some sort of "game state system" which switches between the different game states; these might be things like "Intro", "MainMenu", "CharacterSelect", "Loading", and "Game". On the one hand, it totally makes sense to separate these into a state system. After all, they are disparate and would otherwise need to be in a large switch statement, which is obviously messy; and they certainly are well represented by a state system. But at the same time, I look at the "Game" state and wonder if there's something wrong about this state system approach. Because it's like the elephant in the room; it's HUGE and obvious but nobody questions the game state system approach. It seems silly to me that "Game" is put on the same level as "Main Menu". Yet there isn't a way to break up the "Game" state. Is a game state system the best way to go? Is there some different, better technique to managing, well, the "game state"? Is it okay to have an intro state which draws a movie and listens for enter, and then a loading state which loops on the resource manager, and then the game state which does practically everything? Doesn't this seem sort of unbalanced to you, too? Am I missing something?

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• Sql Server Prevent Saving Changes That Require Table to be Re-created

  When working with SQL Server Management studio, if you use the Design view of a table and attempt to make a change that will require the table to be dropped and re-added, you may receive an error message like this one: Saving changes is not permitted.  The changes you have made require the following tables to be dropped and re-created.  You have either made changes to a table that cant be re-created or enabled the option Prevent saving changes that require the table to be re-created. In truth, its quite likely that you didnt enable such an option, despite the error dialogs accusations, as it is enabled by default when you install SQL Management Studio.  You can learn more about the issue in the KB article, Error message when you try to save a table in SQL Server 2008: Saving changes is not permitted. Warning: As the above article states, it is not recommended that you turn off this option (at least not permanently), as it will ensure that you do not accidentally change the schema of a table such that data is lost.  Do so at your peril. The simplest way to bypass this error is to go into Option Designers and uncheck the option Prevent saving changes that require table re-creation.  See the screenshot below. The main reason why you will see this error is if you attempted to do any of the following to the table whose design you are saving: Change the Allow Nulls setting for a column Reorder columns Change any columns data type Add a new column The recommended workaround is to script out the changes to a SQL file and execute them by hand, or to simply write out your own T-SQL to make the changes. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Unattended grub configuration after kernel upgrade

  - by bouke

  Today I have been working on automatic deployment of an ubuntu server. I got stuck on automatic updating of the server using apt-get upgrade trying to upgrade to a new kernel. The log looks like this: Setting up linux-image-3.2.0-24-generic (3.2.0-24.39) ... Testing for an existing GRUB menu.lst file ... found: /boot/grub/menu.lst (...) Then a question is presented: Package configuration +---------------------------------¦ +---------------------------------+ ¦ A new version of /boot/grub/menu.lst is available, but the version ¦ ¦ installed currently has been locally modified. ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ What would you like to do about menu.lst? ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ install the package maintainer's version ¦ ¦ keep the local version currently installed ¦ ¦ show the differences between the versions ¦ ¦ show a side-by-side difference between the versions ¦ ¦ show a 3-way difference between available versions ¦ ¦ do a 3-way merge between available versions (experimental) ¦ ¦ start a new shell to examine the situation ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ <Ok> ¦ ¦ ¦ +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ The desired outcome would be to select the first option and to continue: Replacing config file /run/grub/menu.lst with new version Updating /boot/grub/menu.lst ... done After running the upgrade by hand, I used debconf-get-selections to inspect the correct answer for the question (see other settings). It seems like update_grub_changeprompt_threeway is the question that should be answered. However, setting this using debconf-set-selections presented me with the same question: debconf-set-selections <<< "grub grub/update_grub_changeprompt_threeway select install_new" apt-get -y dist-upgrade How can this question be automated?

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• Ubuntu 12.04.1 Update Manager and synaptic Package Manager not working

  - by Ashoke

  Recently installed Ubuntu 12.04.1, 64bit on Intel Quad core system. There is a Red Circle with a WHITE 'minus' sign on the upper right hand corner. In the end of a long message displayed below the RED CIRCLE in 'grey' says that INSTALLED PACKAGES HAVE UNMET DEPENDENCIES. None of the following is working. 1. Ubuntu Software Center not opening. UPDATE MANAGER Could not initialize the package information An unresolvable problem occurred while initializing the package information. Please report this bug against the 'update-manager' package and include the following error message: 'E:Encountered a section with no Package: header, E:Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/in.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_precise-updates_multiverse_binary-i386_Packages, E:The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.' SYNAPTIC PACKAGE MANAGER AN ERROR OCCURED The following details are provided E: Encountered a section with no Package: header E: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/in.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_precise-updates_multiverse_binary-i386_Packages E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened. E: _cache-open() failed, please report. Otherwise, the computer is working fine with broadband WiFi internet. InstallPLEASE HELP.

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• How Do I Search For Struct Items In A Vector? [migrated]

  - by Vladimir Marenus

  I'm attempting to create an inventory system using a vector implementation, but I seem to be having some troubles. I'm running into issues using a struct I made. NOTE: This isn't actually in a game code, this is a separate Solution I am using to test my knowledge of vectors and structs! struct aItem { string itemName; int damage; }; int main() { aItem healingPotion; healingPotion.itemName = "Healing Potion"; healingPotion.damage= 6; aItem fireballPotion; fireballPotion.itemName = "Potion of Fiery Balls"; fireballPotion.damage = -2; vector<aItem> inventory; inventory.push_back(healingPotion); inventory.push_back(healingPotion); inventory.push_back(healingPotion); inventory.push_back(fireballPotion); if(find(inventory.begin(), inventory.end(), fireballPotion) != inventory.end()) { cout << "Found"; } system("PAUSE"); return 0; } The preceeding code gives me the following error: 1c:\program files (x86)\microsoft visual studio 11.0\vc\include\xutility(3186): error C2678: binary '==' : no operator found which takes a left-hand operand of type 'aItem' (or there is no acceptable conversion) There is more to the error, if you need it please let me know. I bet it's something small and silly, but I've been thumping at it for over two hours. Thanks in advance!

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• A mechanism to include site title in every page, but not in <title> element

  - by Saeed Neamati

  Each site can have a name. For example, site x. Each page also can have a name (or a title) that should appear in <title> tag in the header. However, many websites out there use the combination site name - page name to provide the value for <title> tag. I find it a little far from being semantic. On the other hand, if you only include page title in <title> tag, search engines won't find your site by its name. For example, if your site's name is Thought Results and you don't include it in page titles, then if you search for Thought Results, you won't find your site in SERPs. Thus I'm searching for a mechanism to both include site title (not page title) in every page, and also only include page title in <title> tag to get more semantic results. Is there any way to achieve this?

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• Getting Internal Name of a Share Point List Fields

  - by Gino Abraham

  Over the last 2 weeks i was developing a tool to migrate Lotus notes data base to Share point. The mapping between Lotus notes schema and share point list schema was done manually in an xml file for out tool. To map the columns we wanted internal names of each field. There are quite a few ways to achieve this, have explained few below. If you want internal names for one or 2 columns you can do so by navigating to the list setting and clicking on the column name. Once you are in column's details, you can check the query string of the page. The last item in the query string would be field's internal. Replace all "%5f" with '_' will give you the field internal name. In my case there were more than 80 columns. I used power shell to get the list of columns with details. Open windows Powershell and paste the following script after modifying the url and list name. [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint") $site = new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite(http://yousitecolurl) $web = $site.OpenWeb() $list = $web.Lists["yourlist name"] $list.Fields | Format-Table Title, InternalName, TypeAsString I also found a tool in Codeplex.com which can generate a wrapper class for a list. The wrapper class will give you the guid and internal name for all fields in the list.  You can download the tool from http://imtech.codeplex.com/ Just enter the url in the text box and hit open. All the site content will be listed at the left hand side, expand the list, right click and select generate wrapper class.

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• How to talk a client out of a Flash website?

  - by bunglestink

  I have recently been doing a bunch of web side projects through word of mouth recommendations only. Although I am much more a of a programmer than a designer by any means, my design skills are not terrible, and do not hate dealing with UI like many programmers. As a result, I find myself lured into a bunch of side projects where aside from a minimal back end for content administration, most of the programming is on front end interfaces (read javascript/css). By far the biggest frustration I have had is convincing clients that they do not want Flash. Aside the fact that I really do not enjoy Flash "development", there are many practical reasons why Flash is not desirable (lack of compatibility across devices, decreased client accessibility, plug-in requirements, increased development time, etc.). Instead of just flat out telling the clients "I will not build you a flash website", I would much rather use tactics to convince/explain to them that this is not what they actually want, ie: meet their requirements any better than standard html/css/js and distract users from their content. What kind of first hand experience do others have with this? How do you explain to someone that javascript/css/AJAX is usually a better option for most websites? Why do people want to use Flash so bad to begin with? This question pertains to clients who do not have any technical reasons for wanting flash, but just want it because they think it makes pretty websites.

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• How to refactor while keeping accuracy and redundancy?

  - by jluzwick

  Before I ask this question I will preface it with our environment. My team consists of 3 programmers working on multiple different projects. Due to this, our use of testing is mostly limited to very general black box testing. Take the following assumptions also: Unit Tests will eventually be written but I'm under strict orders to refactor first Ignore common Test-Driven Development techniques when given this environment, my time is limited. I understand that if this were done correctly, our team would actually save money in the long-term by building Unit-Tests before hand. I'm about to refactor a fairly large portion of the code that is critical. While I believe my code will accurately work when done and after our black box testing, I realize that there will be new data that the new code might not be able to handle. What I wanted to know is how to keep old code that functions 98% of the time so that we can call those subroutines in case the new code doesn't work properly. Right now I'm thinking of separating the old code in a separate class file and adding a variable to our config that will tell the program which code to use. Is there a better way to handle this? NOTE: We do use revision control and we have archived builds so the client could always revert to a previous build, but I would like to see if there is a decent way of doing this besides reverting. I want this so they can use the other new functionality delivered in the new build. Edit: While I agree I will need to write Unit Tests for this, I don't believe I will capture everything with them. I'm looking for ways to easily be able to revert to the old, functional code should anything happen. While I know this is a poor practice, I'm planning on removing this code after our team can guarantee that the new code works to the same standards as the old.

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• Modern techniques for spriting

  - by DevilWithin

  Hello, I would like to know the flow for making modern 2D game artwork. How are the assets made nowadays? Bitmap? Vector-based? Hand-drawn and painted? Drawn digitally? Modeled in 3D and exported to bitmaps? I would like some information on programs as well, for fine looking art. Why does Flash's vector art style look good in most games? How do I make equivalent graphics with external tools? Or equaly good and not vector-based, anyway. Any special hints for animating? An answer oriented towards a one-man-army indie developer with little experience but some artistic sense would be appreciated! Not a complete dummy with paint programs, but also not a master at all, just need efficient ways to achieve results. Thanks. NOTE: Pixel art is not the goal of this question, nothing related to direct pixel manipulation should be brought up here, but you're free to do exactly that :)

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• Is unit testing development or testing?

  - by Rubio

  I had a discussion with a testing manager about the role of unit and integration testing. She requested that developers report what they have unit and integration tested and how. My perspective is that unit and integration testing are part of the development process, not the testing process. Beyond semantics what I mean is that unit and integration tests should not be included in the testing reports and systems testers should not be concerned about them. My reasoning is based on two things. Unit and integration tests are planned and performed against an interface and a contract, always. Regardless of whether you use formalized contracts you still test what e.g. a method is supposed to do, i.e. a contract. In integration testing you test the interface between two distinct modules. The interface and the contract determine when the test passes. But you always test a limited part of the whole system. Systems testing on the other hand is planned and performed against the system specifications. The spec determines when the test passes. I don't see any value in communicating the breadth and depth of unit and integration tests to the (systems) tester. Suppose I write a report that lists what kind of unit tests are performed on a particular business layer class. What is he/she supposed to take away from that? Judging what should and shouldn't be tested from that is a false conclusion because the system may still not function the way the specs require even though all unit and integration tests pass. This might seem like useless academic discussion but if you work in a strictly formal environment as I do, it's actually important in determining how we do things. Anyway, am I totally wrong? (Sorry for the long post.)

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• Should I give the answer to a failed interview coding exercise?

  - by GlenH7

  We had a senior level interview candidate fail a nuance of the FizzBuzz question*. I mean, really, utterly, completely, failed the question - not even close. I even coached him through to thinking about using a loop and that 3 and 5 were really worth considering as special cases. He blew it. Just for QA purposes, I gave the same exact question to three teammates; gave them 5 minutes; and then came back to collect their pseudo-code. All of them nailed it and hadn't seen the question before. Two asked what the trick was... On a different logic exercise, the candidate showed some understanding of some of the features available within the language he chose to use (C#). So it's not as if he had never written a line of code. But his logic still stunk. My question is whether or not I should have given him the answer to the logic questions. He knew he blew them, and acknowledged it later in the interview. On the other hand, he never asked for the answer or what I was expecting to see. I know coding exercises can be used to set candidates up for failure (again, see second link from above). And I really tried to help him home in on answering the core of the question. But this was a senior level candidate and Fizz-Buzz is, frankly, ridiculously easy even with accounting for interview jitters. I felt like I should have shown him a way of solving the problem so that he could at least learn from the experience. But again, he didn't ask. What's the right way to handle that situation? *Okay, that's not the link to the actual FizzBuzz question, but it is a good P.SE discussion around FizzBuzz and links to the various aspects of it.

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• 2D map/plane with nodes overlayed that supports panning, scaling and clicking on nodes

  - by garlicman

  I'm trying my hand at Android development and seem to be running into an invisible ceiling in trying to get what I want accomplished. Basically I'm trying to create an app that renders a 2D surface map that I can (pinch) zoom and pan. I'll have to place nodes on the surface of the map that will scale/zoom and pan in relation to the surface. I started out with a 2D ImageView approach and got as far as pinch zoom, pan and laying nodes as relative ImageViews, but all the methods I tried to get X,Y,W,H for the 2D surface were always off for some reason. Additionally, I was never able to scale the node ImageViews correctly, and as a result never got far enough to try and work out their X,Y scaled offset. So I decided to get back to 3D rendering. Conceptually pan/zoom is camera manipulation, so I don't have to mess with how to scale the 2D map or the nodes. But I need a starting point or sample to get me going that's close to what I'm trying to achieve. A sample on a translucent spinning cube isn't helping as much as I need it to. Any tips? Links, insults and sympathy are all welcome!

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